Incoming Trump Administration likely to be an ethical train wreck

Outrage over President-elect Donald Trump's refusal to divest
himself of his global business empire has grown in the wake of his chaoticpress conferenceWednesday, during which he announced
that he would merely hand his businesses over to his sons.

After the press conference—wherein the piles of paper displayed
as"evidence"of Trump's business handover to his
sons were also apparentlycompletely blank—the
director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) made anunusual public
speechat the
Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., condemning the president-elect for
his ethics failures.

"I wish circumstances were different and I didn't feel the
need to make public remarks today," said Walter M. Schaub Jr. "You
don't hear about ethics when things are going well."

Schaub went on to delve into exactly why Trump's business plan
is wholly "meaningless":

Stepping back from running
his business is meaningless from a conflict of interest perspective. The presidency
is a full-time job and he would've had to step back anyway. The idea of setting
up a trust to hold his operating businesses adds nothing to the equation. This
is not a blind trust—it's not even close.

[I]t's not even halfway
blind. The only thing this has in common with a blind trust is the label,
'trust.'

His sons are still running the businesses, and, of course, he knows
what he owns.

His own attorney said today that he can't 'un-know' that he owns
Trump tower.

The same is true of his other holdings. The idea of limiting
direct communication about the business is wholly inadequate. That's not how a
blind trust works. There's not supposed to be any information at all.

Trump's transition team has also apparently not been in touch
with the OGE at all about Trump's holdings and business plans.

"I was especially troubled by the statement that the
incoming administration is going to demand that OGE approve a diversified
portfolio of assets," Schaub noted.

"No one has ever talked to us
about that idea, and there's no legal mechanism to do that. Instead, Congress
set up OGE's blind trust program under the Ethics in Government Act. Under that
law anyone who wants a blind trust has to work with OGE from the start, but OGE
has been left out of this process. We would have told them that this
arrangement fails to meet the statutory requirements."

"[E]very president in modern times has taken the strong
medicine of divestiture," Schaub noted, adding that Trump's appointees are
required by law to divest their holdings before serving in his cabinet.
"Should a president hold himself to a lower standard than his own
appointees?"

Moreover, the president-elect's lawyers alsostatedWednesday that Trump will go back on
his"no new
deals"pledge—in
which he swore that his corporate empire wouldn't involve itself in any new
business contracts—and will instead refrain only from foreign deals.

"In closing," Schaub concluded, "I would just
like to add that I'm happy to offer my assistance and the assistance of my
staff."

And Schaub wasn't the only one blasting Trump's so-called
business plans. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) took to Twitter on Wednesday
night to call them "a joke.

Meanwhile, theIndependentdelvedinto the many oddities of the massive
piles of papers and folders at Trump's press conference, which were presented
as evidence of his ethical behavior—and explained that they were all apparently
blank:

[R]eporters were not
allowed to look at any of the documents, which all were held in folders meaning
that the actual paper was hidden.

And the pages themselves appear to be blank. While the majority of the sheets
were hidden, some of them were visible – and there was no sign of page numbers
or the sticky notes that lawyers tend to use to mark places in large documents.

The paper itself also
appeared to be the wrong size, printed on A4 rather than legal size sheets, and
appears to have fallen like fresh sheets of paper. And the folders themselves
were also entirely blank, despite Mr. Trump suggesting that each of them
related to a different business that Mr. Trump was moving himself away from.

"It is possible that the documents had been printed
precisely for the press conference, but the fact that reporters weren't allowed
to check the details of the documents led to concern that they didn't include
any information at all," the British outlet noted.

Thought for the day

Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC! Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!

Individual One’s tweet at 4:52 AM - 17 Feb 2019 after a long, hard day of playing golf at Mar-A-Lago on Day Two of our “national emergency.”

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